SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to three renowned scientists, one of whom is from the Bay Area.
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This year's three honorees were Alain Aspect of the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna in Austria and John Clauser, of J.F. Clauser and Associates in Walnut Creek.
The winners were recognized for pioneering experiments in quantum information science, a field that has the potential to completely change how we transfer information. Their collective research confirms theories surrounding the "entanglement" of photons or how particles can affect each other, no matter the distance between them – a phenomenon Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".
"It's every scientists' goal and I’m quite thrilled," Clauser told KCBS Radio’s Patti Reising and Bret Burkhart on Tuesday afternoon.
He added he was completely caught off guard by the prize.
"I didn't know I was going to get it," he said. "I had suspicions. In 2010, my co-recipients, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger and I won The Wolf Prize from the state of Israel and the following year I knew I was nominated for a prize, as a follow-on to the Wolf Prize. But that didn't happen. After a while I sort of said 'ho-hum' don’t lose any sleep over staying up for the phone call."
Ironically, the award did end up costing Clauser sleep because the unexpected congratulatory phone call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences arrived during the dead of night.
"It was at 2:50 in the morning. I was definitely surprised. I was sound asleep," he said. "I didn’t have time (to go back to sleep) because I then kept getting all these phone calls. It took me an hour to get my pants on and another hour to finally get some coffee in me so I could make sense."
The post-midnight phone call aside, the distinguishment was even more shocking for Clauser since he was being honored for a scientific breakthrough he accomplished nearly 50 years ago.
The 79-year-old grew up in the Baltimore suburbs, and, after taking undergrad at CalTech and earning a PhD from Columbia, worked in the physics department at UC Berkeley along with two of the most prestigious science laboratories in the Bay Area: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That's when Clauser made his revolutionary discovery in quantum mechanics.
"Basically, quantum mechanics says that the two photons are entangled which means they maintain very strong correlations that cannot be explained simply by saying they are partners in chance." he explained. "This was predicted way back in the '30s by Schroedinger and Einstein, but not observed at the time, only that the two electrons and the helium atom are similarly correlated. But the theory predicts that they will still strongly be correlated even when they're widely separated."
"Nobody had ever tested that so in ‘69 Abner Shimoney, Mike Horne and Dick (Richard) Holt and I first posed the experiment to test this, when I was still a graduate student at Columbia. And then in 1972, I came to the University of California at Berkeley physics department and Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and I actually did the first experiment to determine that yes, this is a very real phenomenon.”
Fast-forward 50 years, and that transformative work earned Clausen one of the highest honors in science and a share of the $900,000 prize that comes with.
How did he plan to celebrate?
"Finally try to get some sleep," Clausen said. "I hadn’t had a chance to get any sleep since because I keep talking to journalists."
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